Extending Designs on Nature Further

Jasanoff’s Designs on Nature studies and attempts to answer primarily one overarching question: Why and how do various Western countries, that largely share common political ideologies, economic systems, worldviews, and technological innovations, choose to govern emerging technologies in divergent ways? To answer this, Jasanoff builds upon many of the previous readings from this class and explores the decision- and knowledge-making institutions tasked with creating regulatory, ontological, ethical, epistemological, legal, and other frameworks to accommodate expansions in technology. Working through the lens of biotechnologies, Jasanoff illuminates the history behind biotechnology knowledge-making in the US, UK, and Germany, and contrasts the apparatuses in each state to arrive at a theory of civic epistemologies, the ‘institutionalized practices by which members of a given society test and deploy knowledge claims used as a basis for making collective choices’ (255).

In her analysis, Jasanoff does explore how international institutions (the EU) shape emerging technology knowledge-making, but the focus is primarily on national approaches and leaves much of the development, and possible future development, of international approaches unexplored. Although I wouldn’t consider this a weakness of her analysis, international knowledge-making is very likely to become more important over time with the continued dimunition of the national state as the agent of primary importance. While likely to influence and shape much of the international debate on responsible, safe, and ethical uses of biotechnologies, these three states do share common cultural, linguistic, and developmental roots. Although this does allow for a more nuanced analysis of their respective knowledge-making apparatuses (allowing one to gloss over the potentially major differences one encounters in comparing states of widely different cultures and histories), it does leave out an analysis of other very important civic epistemologies, like those in East Asia and South Asia. Again, I don’t consider this a weakness of Designs on Nature, but carrying this type of analysis further necessitates the investigation of these alternate epistemologies.

Japan, for instance, has a model largely consistent with Germany’s consensus-seeking model, although arguably less efficient and less government-focused. Japan’s bureaucratic leaders operate largely independent from the elected government, seeking to build consensus in a behind-the-scenes fashion with predominately corporate interests. This has led to accusations of undemocratic-ness and non-inclusiveness in the way the Japanese government pursues policymaking, which has only recently begun seeing changes. Studying Japan using the methodology Jasanoff outlines in Designs, with Germany as the comparison, would yield interesting insight into how a potentially major influencer of international emerging technology epistemology would go about forming its legal, ethical, and social stances. (Comparing Public Policies – Adolino & Blake)

And although Jasanoff does take care to show how political considerations can influence the formation of knowledge claims in each of these states, a slightly more thorough analysis of this point would also yield substantial insight. Speaking from the perspective of a political scientist, the distribution of political resources and the intentions of the actors within a structure substantially influence the direction that a given policy takes. Although structure is very important (and very probably the most important aspect of a political system), the old considerations of ‘who gets what, when, and how’ as decided by agents still influences the formation of knowledge claims.